Introduction

This is a repost of a tiny portion of my original website: I published some of this in my poetry book - see "buy poetry" on the banner menu on my main blog here - here are all travels & travails. 

Note: as this is a set-piece, posts are in chronological order - oldest at top, the reverse of default settings - to follow sequentially as in the book.

Find also old poetry & writings from the original website, some of which are in the book. 

Life stories: 1957

 Escape from the Iron Curtain Map [Previous ¦ Next]

October 1956 saw the invasion of Budapest, Hungary by Yuri Andropov's Soviet tanks. My parents were pregnant with me, and decided that if they ever were going to emigrate, it better be done before I was born - crossing the border in secret with a babe in arms would be well nigh impossible. So Dad got a permit from his employer underhanded (Dad was a geologist working in coal mines then, and his boss, um, left in his drawer the signed notice that allowed him to leave town for work). They went to the New Year's eve party of a friend, who alone knew they would not return home that night. They boarded instead the train bound for the Austrian border, and when police control came by they stayed in the toilets - those were simply holes in the wagon floor, so you can imagine an eight-month pregnant mother enjoying the draft on a cold December night! They disembarked, paid off a farmer boy who led them to the mine fields along the border, which was just being closed after the unrest. They thread their way past the miradors across the border river Laita frozen at this time of the year. Austria was nominally neutral, but it happened to dispatch empty postal lorries along its eastern border, to pick up refugees on foot and ship them to a disaffected train station in Vienna. It had been converted into an immigrant processing center, to which converged head-hunters from Canada, South Africa and Australia among others. Hungarian refugees were mostly white-collar workers with some means and unattached to the land, and thus a rich crop for nations in post-war growth.

2004 add.: When I was at Esri, I managed the Petroleum User Group session at the International User Conference. It hosted SAG (Special Achievement in GIS) awards, and that year the Austria Post was a recipient. So I approached the local distributor's manager, who received the coveted award. After introductions, I told him my recollection of postal lorries patrolling the border at the cusp of 1956 & 1957. He fetched a senior manager about my age, and his eyes went big as saucers: He had heard about it but dismissed it as an urban myth, so it must be true he said. We quickly slid off to safer topics such as where I was born and baptised:  few have the chance to be associated with not one but two prestigious locales in Vienna, they quipped.

My Dad's best friend from university (they were born the same day and thus were registered together) found my parents on a bale of hay, and immediately had Mum whisked off to the Semelweiss clinic (named after he who reduced infant mortality by simply instructing nurses to wash their hands before assisting in childbirth). I was born three weeks late no doubt due to the stressful voyage, and a kindly old member of parliament took care of us. He arranged that I be baptised in the Stefansdom (St. Stephen's cathedral), from which I got my middle name. My Dad actually got a job with Exxon in Calgary, but the Canadian government would only ship us from its eastern seaboard. This was the dead of the winter, all liners were full and my parents didn't care to risk the passage with a month-old babe on a cargo ship (either there were no flights then, or they couldn't afford them). So Dad accepted a post in Paris because Mum got a Ford scholarship to study at the Sorbonne in Paris. '57 was about as bad as '87 and my Dad bounced among jobs until he landed his career job with the French national oil company which would become Elf a quarter century later. We also moved to southern France and started a new life under idyllic circumstances. Pau was small and not unfriendly as many Spaniards had just emigrated to escape the Franco regime. There were however only two Hungarian families around, and Pau was very provincial in that nothing foreign was available.

Life stories: 1961

 Out of the frying pan into the fire Map [Previous ¦ Next]

Dad worked as a geologist for the international team of French national oil company Elf-Aquitaine, and the north African Sahara region was just yielding its riches to seismic and drilling investigation. We thus went to Algiers, but unfortunately landed amidst a revolution, when local chiefly Muslim Arabic people were pushing the colonial French into the sea - we moved seven times in the six months we spent there, and I clearly remember tying my shoelaces the first time outside in the driveway to the boom of distance howitzers. A pump jockey was shot dead for serving gasoline to my Dad's French car - I sat across the window glass when the sharp pop was followed by the thud of a body, the roar of the engine and squealing of tires as my Dad sped off.

In stark contrast I was introduced to the vast expanse and unending light in the Sahara. L'ombre du désert (desert shadow in the sky) as the setting sun cast earth's shadow above the eastern horizon in dusty air. Silent hommes bleus du désert (blue men of the desert) appearing as if by magic on their solemn dromedaries (single-humped camels), then disappearing on their quiet footfalls in the soft sand: tuaregs robed in blue from head to toe, sun-tanned skin stained with blue dye pounded into the fabric with no benefit of water; bright eyes and teeth flash briefly as they turn away with the grace and supreme confidence of desert masters. Bright light and knifing shadows in villages, houses close together to keep out the sun and the heat, awnings bridging buildings and trapping air into suffocating dark corridors infested with flies, cries, kids both children and goats. Men running with a litière, improvised stretcher to rush a body to be buried before sunset per Muslim rule. Women in black chadors and men in white jelebayas, counterpointing the stark sunlight and deep shadows.

Dull winter days in cinder-black houses with tile floors and no heating to cut the chill. Curfews and bodies shrouded in brown paper, which we learned to step over all too casually. War is random: all quiet in one street, the muffled report of a bomb exploding around the corner, crowds rushing to the scene and taking us with them, my parents attempting to turn me away from an empty blood-stained pram akimbo in the rubble. I was young, but my parents had lived through this during World War II then the uprising in Budapest, and their parents before that during World War I, and theirs yet before in the Prussian wars of late 1800s. When would it ever end? When would I stop jumping every time something popped, the exhaust in an old car or gunfire in movies? When would I quit being fascinated by things military? My parents refused to talk let alone cry, a total blackout on anything before my birth. I learned by age four that they might provide for me materially but not emotionally.

Life stories: 1963

 Nirvana at last [Previous ¦ Next]

After the desert debacle, my Dad was offered a plum posting in Brisbane, on the northeastern coast of Australia. We traveled widely thru North America (New York, Grand Canyon, New Orleans, Dallas and LA), S. Pacific (Tahiti, Fiji, New Guinea), SE Asia (Philippines, Japan, Kampuchea, Hong- Kong, Sri Lanka, Kashmir and India no less than twice), as my Dad's firm sent us abroad and then back home at regular intervals as expatriates. My parents could afford all they wanted, a new company car, a large house with veranda and lush tropical garden, delightfully open Aussies and tightly-knit expats (expatriates), private school for me, bridge for Mum, field work in the vast Australian interior for Dad, long road trips up the Queensland coast and the Great Barrier Reef, down New South Wales and the Snowy Mountains. I learned English in no time in the streets with a very broad Queensland accent, ran barefoot and half naked, indulged in swimming, rugby and cricket, and started a 30 year-long love affair with horseback riding and pets. Life was good, at last.

On the downside we were far from what Mum and Dad called home, while I vowed to stay down under. The labor régime brought endless strikes, so much so that cooking stoves had both gas and electric ranges so one could cook regardless. One never knew when mail would arrive from halfway across the world where everything seemed to happen. Alcohol was big, some workers took weekly pay, drank at the pub, and women took the car on Saturday to shop on what money was left by their men. Racism and misogyny were not even perceived as such, and Aussies still turned their backs on their southeast Asian neighbours (giving Sukarno free rein in Indonesia and looking on as the US engaged in Vietnam). The country's socialist traditions mirrored those I knew in France, and thus helped form my political education with more continuity than my peregrinations might initially have lead to believe.

I also learned a lot on life at an early age: I was exposed to eastern religions early and countering my Catholic upbringing. My parents were not really religious, a dislocation that was reinforced by back-to-back French and Australian (read: British at the time) education. History for example was seen so differently by those two former empires, that I relied on dates and place names to recognise matching events! I was only to learn later on that my parents had emigrated with an empty suitcase filled with a rucksack, so they were hard up for cash to early on. They were however well treated by the French government, and afforded privileges not given to native French: refugees' welcome already brought ill feelings from their hosts still learning to cope with the post-colonial era: This would go on through the end of the century, and wrack society post-Soviet régime and -Balkan wars.

Life stories: 1965

 Family ties [Previous ¦ Next]

After escaping Hungary and living halfway across the world, my parents finally felt ready to face family again, and we visited both grandmothers in Southern France and Dad's brother's family in Geneva. We daren't return to Hungary, because we had no citizenship as yet. My Mum's Dad had died in prison, having been part of the pre-communist régime, though her Mum lived on alone for almost 30 years (I was closest to her, though I rarely saw her). My Dad's Dad suffered from depression and already could not travel. My uncle was also an expat in Sudan, part of communist régime's help in parts of Africa, Southeast Asia and South America, which wreaked so much havoc for example in Cuba and Vietnam. My uncle was to die soon of untreated cancer, ironic considering that he taught medicine. Resulting unresolved and/or unexpressed grief from my Dad, would further add to tension in the family. For example he would leave for months in the bush for his job and never call back, when I never believed he could not.

Two trips were highlights for me, Papua New Guinea (1964) and New Zealand (1966) in the intervening years the company didn't pay for our trip home. Papuans still saw stone age co-exist with modern era, mountainous interior stayed much as it had before colonisation, and coastal areas thrived in modernity. That really struck me as a youth, and I'll always recall the village festival near Mount Hagen in the Papua highlands. Mountain men had a big toe that was almost like an opposing thumb for climbing up trees and muddy slopes, so imagine my surprise when a man riding a bicycle in loin-cloth and feathered head-dress used his big toe as a brake by sticking it between front tire and fork. Or to see women stick their afro in a pail of bleach and have lighter hair above a straight line over their ears. New Zealand was a less happy experience, as we toured North Island but never reached South Island due to a terrible car accident near Gisborne (it would gain fame later as the first major city west of the dateline and thus into the new millennium). Suffice it to say that while our old car had lap-belts in Brisbane, new shoulder belts in our then-new our rental car saved my parents' lives!

2016 update: what are the chances... Did you know we rented a semi near Cambridge UK, because the land lady joined her Kiwi husband near Tauranga... and that her husband said that, 50 years later it is still a black spot on the coastal road to Gisborne!

Life stories: 1967

 Second home and citizenship  [Previous ¦ Next]

Mum and Dad and I returned to Pau in southwestern France at the end of an expat cycle, and now we were able to gain French citizenship (our first opportunity was in Algiers when everyone knew he'd be conscripted if naturalised, and our second opportunity was in Brisbane that had no French consulate or embassy, so our application for naturalisation got delayed over a decade). Interestingly enough, only two countries did not let us in with out titre de voyage, travel document, in all our worldly travels until then... by which time I had been around the world twice at age ten! My parents bought an apartment and finally decided that France was it. My Mum having had a hemorrhage after my birth, had not been able to conceive since, but new treatments allowed her to have my sister and brother 18 months apart, over a dozen years after me. Her body took it hard however at age 40 as she was never strong physically, and was ridden by depression as we would learn later. So I ended up raising my siblings as a teen, which proved a disaster for me and an effective psychological contraceptive for my next 25 years...

I worked hard and well through school, and life was good next to the Pyrénées mountains, where Dad bought a condo and I skied and hiked a lot. Also renewed my love affair with horse and pet, in a town with long-standing British traditions (Pau boasted golf-course, casino and horseback riding facilities since the early XIX c., when Wellington fell in love with the place upon returning from a Spanish military campaign). My parents' efforts that I keep up my English also helped me maintain an English-French duality that would become critical later on.

Life stories: 1975

 The end of a cycle  [Previous ¦ Next]

I earned my baccalauréat with much difficulty, but forged lifelong friendships with three boys and a girl (one boy would die of cancer later, and the girl was to be lost and found again on the internet after 25 years). They were surrogate family, who helped negotiate my challenging teens. I was confused around homeland, got caught up in French student demonstrations and basically learned to dislike France. Civil law didn't sit well with me (one is deemed guilty until proven innocent, unlike common law I knew in Australia), neither did the French manifesto liberté, égalité, fraternité (I thought freedom encouraged initiative and inevitably lead to inequality, while equality maintained by government rules curtailed freedom, and the brotherhood of man did not look good in my world travels and turbulent family history): For example one always had to carry positive identification, and I was once hauled off to the police station during a demonstration in 1968; I was an innocent bystander who left his papers at home, at age 11 when politics and papers are not one's greatest concern!

My parents were also on a down cycle after paradise down under in Australia: Dad's career shunted aside, Mum's weak health, and siblings kicking up all manner of unresolved issues as young ones will do. Closer proximity to Hungary helped little, as we dared not return until well after our naturalisation, just before my Dad's Dad went into the night after a life at dusk. I would later learn that depression is the silent killer, is passed down-generation, and quietly oppresses close ones unawares. It would remain undiagnosed for half my parents' life. I seriously considered escaping this to become a priest, but then again I was wracked by self- inconsistencies, which were to haunt Catholicism in the new millennium. I took a keen interest in both early Christian and early Medieval history, as I saw there the seeds of modern events.

Life stories: 1977

 New beginnings  [Previous ¦ Next]

My parents moved to Calgary, and that gave me another escape route. I joined them later to become a landed immigrant and finish my education in geology in Canada. The decision, the wide open skies, a world that reminded my of Australia in its people if not its climate, all added up to a renewed life and belief in myself. I plunged head-long into Canada and turned my back to France, and as it would turn out later, my family. I was on top of the world and thought I could do it alone, carrying on the splendid isolation men are trained to. The western Canadian prairies, the eastern slopes and central ranges of the Rocky mountains, the long dry winters and a small friendly university, an honest a friendly people all helped me develop a parallel life to my parents' where I lived.

Little did I realise the developing rift between Mum and Dad, as she too found freedom and ended her education started in Paris when we emigrated! How did I not see that Dad dreamed of a son with the same career who would return with him at the end of his expat cycle? Or that siblings were bystanders deemed helpless by my parents... that Calgarians reflected what they saw, thus my parents would push themselves back home, as I watched them go back where I no longer belonged? Parents will not reject their own at first, so they sought to blame Calgary and thus were blind to my decision. I would call it home for twenty years, the longest I'd lived anywhere, and thus consider myself Canadian.

Life stories: 1980

 Riding into the sunset  [Previous ¦ Next]

A trio of events capped this. My entire family acquired our second citizenships, Mum and I graduated within a year of each other, and I met my first wife-to-be. A native Calgarian, artist and horsewoman, she was soon to be blamed for my earlier decision to call Calgary home. An interesting flip happened actually: in our three year courtship her conservative parents were horrified, while mine looked on benignly (deep inside they love Calgarians, but I doubt they admitted it to themselves). When we got married her parents heaved a sigh of relief and I gained a second family, while mine panicked at the implication that I would not return to France. The wedding was all my in-laws', and it would usher a decade-long cold war with my parents that would only end with that marriage.

France has compulsory military service, the alternatives to which were civil service or conscientious objector. I got extensions while I was at university in Calgary, and before I could even consider alternatives I was told to report upon graduation or be considered a deserter. So I went back to the foreign registry, then on to the military barracks in W France, not quite sure how I'd be exempt if at all. Much to my surprise during medical examination, the doctor himself in service understood that one does not arrive from W Canada just to visit, and saw an opportunity: I had had problems with my hearing through my youth, indeed two operations to fix my drum and hearing bones; he tried to exempt me for poor hearing, as that is a critical function in military service. He thought that it being the end of the day, the chief medic might sign my papers absent-mindedly. Sure enough he did, and they regretfully signed me off with one day's wages at he army. No regrets here however, that money bought me the sweetest tasting bottle of wine celebrating my newly found freedom.

No wonder I thought I was on top of the world! I went on to grad school in Kingston, Ontario, where I discovered the second third of this vast land. I capped my love affair with horses with a decade of dressage and competition with one then two horses of our own. And I found a woman whose search matched mine: well traveled, critical of the system, steeped into folk music, health-food nut, believer in doing everything herself, and talented at everything she put her mind to. She took refuge with me in that isolation we thought was it, and we both rode off into the sunset humming our own tune.

Life stories: 1982

 Supernova  [Previous ¦ Next]

Every bill eventually comes due: when we returned to Calgary from Kingston to marry and start my career in petroleum, we were actually heading to a black hole. My parents went supernova when they discovered my life direction, just as they headed back to their home in France. My family life thus collapsed into a nucleus of two, and I looked for no support. Sure we bought a house straight out of college, started work at Shell and rode our horses daily, but I was to dig my own grave in not resolving my own issues around father, family and societal acceptance. I lost my job in the shrinking oil sector, and found odd jobs in geology that kept me going, but I was anaesthetising myself against past hurts that drove me astray.

Relations with my Dad took a nose-dive - he had actually planned for my career in France, first at the vaunted Institut Français du Pétrole (French Petroleum Insitute), then at a major oil company in Paris, and so on as his clone. I admit that geology was my choice, but how could I have expected this and the fact that my future wife, who I had met at a time after deciding to stay in Calgary, would be blamed for this plight? This was nothing however compared to what happened with my thesis: it was used of whole cloth in my Dad's publication to be a summary of his work in N America. Did his absolute lack of acknowledgement indicate that I was considered his chattel, to be disposed of as he wished as in former centuries? It's one thing to read about it in Dickens or Balzac, it's another to live it! I soon overcame this however as my career quickly turned to computer geology; in organising continuing education classes at the local geological society, I actually introduced my Dad to my counterpart at the international geological society: that effectively launched his second career in early retirement, continuing education in N America then E Europe using his otherwise unpublished paper.

Life went on very well just the same. In-laws helped us financially in between jobs, my thesis got published in a journal of some renown, I worked with the Geological Survey, and that allowed me to stretch both in geologic data management and field work. I discovered the last third of my new country, the Arctic Islands. I actually got paid to hike, but most importantly it laid the foundations for my next career in computers. Contract work gave me the freedom to pursue continuing education in ways I hadn't seen before. This lead me also to help run courses and initiatives for local geological and computer societies. And my wife launched an artistic career in ceramics, complete with studio in converted garage and kiln in back yard (much to the consternation of our Block Watch captain across the back alley, who would burst onto the scene much later on).

Life stories: 1986

 Entrepreneur  [Previous ¦ Next]

Three years' contract at the Geological Survey was all a Canadian federal agency could offer (they had been previously sued to hire, when they were deemed then to control one's workplace). I kept my stride however in starting a joint venture with another geophysical firm, for whom I was to offer mapping a geographic information system (GIS) services, while continuing work at the Geological Survey (now safe from aforementioned suits). I call that period my untitled MBA: little did I know if it was hard ot start a venture, it was even harder to wind it down; my joint venture partner ran into trouble at the biggest bust in the petroleum sector, and a recession is very real when even the federal government has to cut back its programs (this was the beginning of the irresistible urge for politicians to cut entire segments of civil service: it gave them rapid returns in cutting deficit at the expense of social contracts, launched by the French revolution and British industrial revolution; ironically this new trend was ushered in by British PM Thatcher and brought across the Atlantic by US President Reagan).

I loved every minute of it as I continued to stretch my own envelope. Self-employment gave me the freedom to follow my nose, and I soon discovered that GIS was the next wave. I partnered with a brilliant surveyor, who also sang madrigals (I was to revisit him a decade later in Houston, after his turbulent entrepreneurship). I also was a volunteer at the XV Winter Olympic Games in Calgary: interpreting for the Hungarian cross-country ski team left me lots of free time to watch the live video feeds throughout the facilities, front-row seats without the bother of sports commentators; those games ushered in far better computer and sound systems, as well as the large-scale use of volunteers inaugurated in the previous winter games of Sarajevo (the fate of that beautiful city in the subsequent Balkan war still my tightens heart). I took a romantic interest then in a fellow Hungarian interpreter, a flirting lass who I left due to a heritage I had yet to come to terms with.

I also took part in another new venture to publish data on compact disks (they were so rare then that CD readers had to be eased with the data). I learned then that CDs did not take off with Microsoft to distribute its ever-larger software, but for military intel as backups if an atomic blast at high altitude neutralised all circuits in the US (that included the fledgling internet, itself started as a link among academic and government institution). Little did we imagine how topical that scenario might become in the new millennium, with terrorists expanding in geography and sophistication (they also use the internet both to communicate via coded messages and to circumvent government censorship of traditional media).

Life stories: 1989

 "Second souffle" (second wind)  [Previous ¦ Next]

I had buried myself in my entrepreneurship and neglected family life, so that when the firm went so did my marriage. My in-laws put as much money into launching that firm as I put into the house, so we forgave each others' loans, called it quits and had a free-and- clear divorce. This was not about personalities but about priorities: either my wife kept the horses and got a paying job to help with upkeep, or she maintain her thriving studio but not the horses; the answer was no to both so I exited left stage, and ended up with $50 to my name. No-one noticed that's about the same as what my parents started with as émigrés, but I noticed that at least I was settled in a country I loved. I suppose that not having had any kids in almost a decade was not insignificant. This break would however put me on the path to real growth, upon all that I learned so far in my variegated life. Reality is what you make it, so I started with forgiving in my heart all ills I perceived my parents to have begotten. I told them too, but if they were unable to hear me then, later events suggest that it had seated in deep recesses of their consciousness; I wrote about: people are good regardless of their behaviour in a recent poem.

I moved into the city core where I could walk to work across the river at all seasons, as well as shop or go to the specialty cinemas or folk clubs. I made or renewed friendships especially among men, reporters at the CBC and CKUA (Canadian radios), fellow entrepreneurs, and forged what would be a lifelong relationship with a fellow geologist also on the path to re-evaluation. Talk about favorable alignment of planets: I accompanied him to one of his early dates with his wife-to-be; and he came to the first date with my wife-to-be. I sought counseling, aware communities and a church, in brief rebuilt my life from scratch to avail myself of all that I had learned. I made mistakes, such as one woman actually a nymphomaniac, a new Jeep that did nothing for me, and new jobs that were not always a good fit. I did meet a woman at the folk club who would be a delightful lover and friend - her church would be a great support group as they were all refugees from mainstream religion, a congregation lead by a southern Baptist who moved north in search of spiritual truth - that would not survive however a job offer back in Europe, which I turned down after visiting them north of Paris (premonition served me well once more, as I saved myself an expensive move when they went bankrupt shortly after).

Having decided to stay put in Calgary, I met another woman at Hallowe'en upon her return from a round-the-world trip with he best college friend from England. We found on our second date that she had been my Block Watch captain and neighbour across the back alley in our previous marriages (and I actually knew her ex professionally... Calgary wasn't that big). Suffice it to say we married a year later and the rest is history. I joined her community derived from Re-evaluation Counseling (RC), which imploded in Calgary after taking on its leaders' distresses (as can happen with small groups). An extra dimension of kinship was that she grew up in England, was an oil-patch bride (after war brides who returned to America with soldiers after World War II), and also decided to remain in Calgary after her divorce. The fact that neither of us had kids previously not only helped us, but also heightened our awareness to clear up emotionally before embarking on the delightful but difficult adventure of parenting. We both had intermittent contracts so we often alternated our pay-cheques and learned how few toys one actually needed. Our record? An evening out with meals and cine-club tickets at $5 each totaling $20 (US and CDN dollars were about on par then...)!

Life stories: 1992

 "Entre deux eaux" (transition) [Previous ¦ Next]

I bounced around various contracts and volunteer opportunities for quite a while. I tried out new ventures, digitising in Guyana, real-time 3D computer software in defense and aerospace, publishing via new encryption on CD-ROMs and the internet, creating digital databases from satellite imagery on a new supercomputer in Calgary, and brokering data providers in the resource industry in Canada and US. None of these amounted to much in the long run, especially no income: I realised that while I was well engaged in geographic information systems (GIS), I could not do it outside of my original profession of petroleum geology. I also helped organise short courses in various fields like GIS, geostatistics and probability, but none of these connections furthered my career much.

Throughout all this I had an equally rich extra-curricular career. I capped a decade in the Ski Patrol system, which allowed me to ski freely and well, as well as offer service to society; first aid however took its toll, as little was known or done about post-traumatic stress disorder. I also helped the Calgary Folk Music Festival, and ran its computers which freed me up to enjoy performances during the festival itself. I also started counseling through the Pastoral Institute, which lead me to examine my own issues and get a grip on my melancholy. I joined a hiking group that allowed free associations and friendships. I found it hard to stay unattached as everything in society seemed to be geared toward couples &/or families. Also I found it hard to find male friends, as I was to learn later that we are trained to separate. With female friends I confused being close with having sex. This lead to one disastrous and one useful relationship prior to meeting my future wife. Our wedding day between Christmas and New Year turned out to be the coldest of the year - a third of the invitees couldn't start their cars or open their doors at -39, where Celsius and Fahrenheit scales merge - we figured it could only warm up from then on!

Life stories: 1994

 New career  [Previous ¦ Next]

A decade after I left my first employer, Shell, and my original petroleum geological career, I had firmly set my sights onto computing geology, and more specifically geographic information systems (GIS). It would take me another five years to land on my feet at the premier GIS company worldwide, but everything seemed to gradually converge toward that: my flexibility toward changing directions when the job market demanded it, an intuition which I trust even when poorly understood at first, an ability to listen to clients and friends and sort out the real issues, and a global outlook which allows to see things in different contexts and formulate new answers. Take my languages for example: I learned French, Hungarian and English in rapid succession as a toddler, then German, Latin and Spanish as a teen; I thus was fluent in the first batch and had a good grasp of grammar and syntax in the last batch - did you know I was in the last cohort in French lycées or high school,  to take a full eight years of Latin... the last one conversational as we'd run out of written materials? - I used this however as an adult not as languages per se, but as an ability to pick up programming languages with no formal training in computer science!

Note: in those days, geological and geophysical programs were run as plain-text scripts via command-line on Unix workstations. Programmers aren't stupid, they're inattentive or careless, and often forget to close, say, parentheses or semi-colons in their scripts. Scripts were most often customised to meet local customer needs. SO if a script failed, I was able to scroll down it, follow the syntax  - from my knowledge of Latin mentioned above, a very structured and logical language - and pinpoint missing bits... with no formal computer training!

As programming was in such high demand however, I was constantly pushed toward the technical realm. I quickly fell in then out of love with the technology (see quote in my home page), and learned that I really wished to help people help themselves with it. I also learned that this is best performed in the context of my original geologic profession, chiefly in petroleum but also in surveys (government) and mining. Having earned what I call an untitled MBA, in launching then winding down my own business, I augmented my broad global outlook with a deep business sense. And I was well on the path to understanding my own psychological strengths and weaknesses: an intangible that proved so useful in helping me manage my colleagues and organise associations of all sorts.

Life stories: 1996

 New home, for now Map index [Previous ¦ Next]

I eventually was hired by a small engineering firm who engaged in GIS, and was subsequently bought out by a large petroleum software firm, in turn gobbled up by one of the largest: Halliburton. I thus regretfully moved from Calgary after 20 years to Dallas, not an obvious adjustment to one of the consumer capitals in the US deep south (pars of the US southeast with traditions going back to separatism, land ownership and slavery prior to the American Civil War). We found our tribe however, through work and African drumming for me, yoga and dance for Sandra, and re-evaluation counseling plus the Unitarian Church for both of us. Sandra had a non-working US visa so she took a break from ten years work with mental health agencies and an education certificate, took her Texas Mediation Certificate and then we had Petra. We managed to find a natural birthing clinic amid the medical-industrial complex, where insurance virtually governs the delivery and quality of medical treatment - quite an adjustment for us who lived in UK, Australia, France and Canada with universal health care and education.

Quick calculations showed that we paid almost the same amount less in taxes, in US vs. Canada, as we paid more in insurance: this amounts to a bulk transfer of funding medical coverage from the public to the private sector; implications are that governments which answer to the entire electorate will support social programs for a majority of a population, whereas corporations will only look after their own subscribing minorities. Thus emerged gradually what was to me a fundamentally new interpretation of democracy: in the US, relatively little is under federal, state or municipal jurisdiction in health and education; they are largely covered by private insurance and schools, many of which are funded by churches. The implied blurring of state and private (incl. church) realms of responsibility pose quite a challenge in the US, where the first Amendment to their Constitution clearly separates Church and State.

All this set me up quite nicely to keep a sharp eye a country that was to become my home soon after: we listened to alternative radio NPR then KPFT (both were listener-supported until NPR sold out to corporate funding, and surprise! it's incisiveness was washed down soon after), and read World Press Review as well as the local news s.a. Dallas Morning News and Houston Chronicle. In fact I happen to have lived in Texas over most of Bush Jr.'s governorship: unbeknownst to me at the time, was the fact I'd know more than may about the man to become the President of the USA five years later. My ultimate boss at Halliburton was also Dick Cheney, his role sandwiched then between those of Secretary of Defense under Bush Sr. (remember Desert Storm?), and Vice-president under Bush Jr. I also set up my first website (see here), home to this page not  a decade after the web's invention... but a decade after I set up a pre-web site (see here)!

Life stories: 1999

 A year of moving  [Previous ¦ Next]

While we found our place in Dallas, we certainly didn't call Texas home and I started looking afield to our next step - I had a good job at Landmark however, more stable after being bought by giant Halliburton. So I found a job near London where lot a the new development in my area were happening; only problem is that it took me a year to execute the move, and we had to move to Houston in the meantime: Houston was really Landmark's headquarters and Dallas was a waning office, and try as I may, I couldn't get telecommuting to work even though communications were excellent (fast internet and hopping airplanes there like buses or trains elsewhere!).

So we move into an apartment in Houston near my workplace, in the vain idea I could walk to work (that happen until a few years later in California, where ironically car is king more than in Texas...). We had a lovely apartment manager from England, who we were to keep in touch wit hover the years. My main problem was that six months of the year in Houston was spent commuting to Bakersfield, on a project in central California, south of which I'd end up so soon after! It was however a successful data management project that earned me a raise and helped me get my job near London - I was stymied in my move as an expat, so I asked Landmark to hire me in England as a European citizen, and my recent raise roughly matched the difference in cost of living from Houston to London.

Presto! I was in Guildford southwest of London in a New York minute, and we found a lovely house to rent in Walton-on-Thames - it lay halfway between Sunbury (BP's global center harking back to WWI, where I worked so hard on a so-called Y2K project), and the Weybridge office of Landmark Halliburton in Brooklands (next to the race track now a shopping center, renowned for racer Malcolm Campbell and Vickers Aircraft whose legends I grew up with in Brisbane). We could afford this due to a real-estate quirk that turned into our favour: housing market was so hot near London, that the wealthy bought houses to invest rather than to live in, and that created a glut in the rental market that dropped rents to a level we could afford. So we rented a three bedroom house overlooking that which Julie Andrews grew up in, and we could never afford otherwise! We loved the Southeast as it's called there, walking along the rich network of pathways in the woods, visiting the rich manors opened to the public by the Heritage Trust, and visited Sandra's parents often as Cambridge lay only a couple hours up the motorway. Petra developed a close relationship with them at age two, which she never did unfortunately with my parents (they visited a whole four days in the year or so we were near London).

Life stories: 2000

 Millenium [Previous ¦ Next]

No sooner was I done with the Y2K project at BP that I turned onto other projects which took me to UAE and Oman, Nigeria, France and Scotland. Again a lot of traveling in project work, that taxed my time with my family - even though Sandra was 'at home', I loved this work and Petra was happy near her gramps, this was not to last forever as it was. My next project lay in Kazakhstan, which may have been a great adventure as a younger bachelor but not with family with the brewing geopolitics of that area. It didn't help that while the previous fall was glorious, this year would turn into the wettest on record, since data were kept starting in 1865 (little did we know then that three years later would see the hottest summer on record, at least we didn't witness both...)! We spent lovely summer holidays nonetheless in the Devon near Bishop's Lydiard and Minehead - lush hill country as you imagine it from romantic English writers, some of whom frequented the adjacent Quantox Hills. We were also southwest of London which is Jane Austen territory, and Sandra's a fan of hers, as well as lots of airplane and automobile history which I grew up with in Australia (Brisbane was far more British than anyone would admit to then!)... My highlight were the fireworks in the 'real Millennium as the English called it, that is January 1 of 2001 not 2000! Barges were set up along the river Thames from Greenwich (the astronomic base for mean time) to Windsor (the royal residence) - not only were the fireworks a sight to behold form each barge, but they were lit in sequence upstream from east to west at the exact second when each barge was at the midnight! Petra slept through it, but what struck me was the quietness of the crown - there were hundred of thousands pressed along hte banks in central London, and never did I feel in any danger of sudden crowd movements or stampedes (not my experience at the 14 Juillet fireworks in Paris a few years prior, where kids threw firecrackers into a smaller crowd which grew restless as a result).

And then the manager I dealt with in southern California at ESRI whose software I used at Landmark, asked me if I'd like to replace him in a few years as director of marketing for petroleum? I thought that 'a few years' would leave us the originally planned time near family in Europe, and while I wasn't looking for work Landmark wasn't offering me a bright path. Most importantly however, project work did mean weeks if not months away from home abroad, whereas a possible sales job might mean weeks if not days away from home on tradeshows. And ESRI worked across many industries, and was thus less subjected to the vagaries of the petroleum industry (or the dot.com and financial debacles we would learn later). If I gave a qualified yes, I had no idea that he'd call me late that summer in a panic - his boss had passed away, he took that job, and would be running two jobs until he found a replacement... So would I please consider moving from London to LA, later that same year?! Well, we had just moved from Houston to London and barely settled in a country I always had wanted to live in (perhaps I married Sandra to vicariously live that?). And Bush Jr. was being elected just then, but we decided it was an issue for Americans not us. So to Sandra and Petra's credit, we pulled up stakes and moved lock-stock&barrel back across the Atlantic ocean and the American continent to Redlands, halfway between LA and Palm Springs in So. Cal. (as southern California is called there). I learned a lot of fortitude from my in-laws, when said: "we look at it as a year more with you, than we would have had otherwise".

Pre-9/11 note - we spent a weekend mid-October to fly to LA for an interview, and Sandra was invited. The weather was perfect interview weather meaning that the air was crystal clear and anyone would want to move there seeing that, and not the haze and heat mid-summer here. What was wonderful in the pre-9/11 era is that we could nip&tuck before our transatlantic flights a visit around Redlands that would never happen today - the Sunday morning before our mid-afternoon flight form LAX an hour and a half drive further east, we went up to the mountains above Redlands that we saw in its pristine state before five years of forest fires destroyed it at the outset of a five years of drought...

I learned that the east end of the valley that opens to the ocean at LA harbor was called by the original Indians Valley of Thousand Smokes,  not hippie joint haven, but rather: there were so many natural wildfires in the dry area, that fire smoke naturally stayed put in this geographic cul-de-sac... This proved to be prophetic in the 2003 - 2004 fire seasons that were as terrible as they were natural. White Man simply built houses where grasslands and woodlands naturally burn. And to top it off, not only were unnatural pine forest planted in original sparse oak woods, they remained unmanaged through forest fire prevention that let them overgrow, so that a five-year drought turned the whole region into an underbrush-clogged tinderbox. I wonder what the Indian elders thought of that, if they weren't too busy building or running casinos on their federal lands?!

2019 Update: this was repeated in SE Australia, only much bigger and more terrifying: Not only were affected areas an order of magnitude larger (open hill country like the Darling Downs, rather than a single valley hemmed in by steep mountains between LA and Palm Springs), but also climate change meant droughts stretching over a decade rather than under five years in So. Cal. For a poignant vocal rendition, listen to Lionel Long's West Country, from the 1964 vinyl album my parents had, Songs of a Sunburnt Country   ***

Back in England, that summer having been the wettest on record, the joke on me was that I was fleeing to the sunshine in SoCal, more on that later. But as many people at Landmark still remembered my move from Calgary to Dallas - midwinter when winters grew colder again in Calgary - the overlain joke was that I kept moving toward better climes... and that prove to be true re: my next move too! Read on...

So we arrive in Redlands on 10 December, and rent an apartment at a local Lawn and Tennis Club on Barton Road, walking distance away from work. It was a moving nightmare, as we had to move our stuff in two lots, one for the apartment, and one for storage - together with our faithful Honda Civic this all fit into a 30 foot trailer, but when we unloaded, we didn't examine what we put into storage - only much later would we find what went missing, too late to claim any damage from moving (in fact only a box of misc. stuff left at the end of packing went missing, but it was maddeningly random like a sleeping back, kitchen utensils etc.).

The move itself in Walton was quite a palaver. It was raining solid (as it had all summer, see right above), and Sandra was busy making tea for the movers who took morning and afternoon breaks, and packed in three days not two - what a contrast with US movers who brought an army of low-paid Mexicans, and did it all in two days not three as planned! As my last show with Landmark at PETEX in London was the week of my move, I had to bow out and they were OK if not happy. But hen my future boss shows up and sets up visits on behalf of ESRI before I even get started, and guess what? We go to PETEX! So I had then to tell my old boss that not only do I not help Landmark at that show, but they might see me with my next employer... Together with my pre-Christmas move, this was a harbinger of things to come in Redlands, but hindsight is 20-20, isn't it?!

I'm not sure what grabbed me that Christmas, but I was caught up in the excitement of the move, and I suppose I daren't stay in an empty apartment with neither friends yet nor family any more - on the face of it, it was rather rude of ESRI to steal my second Christmas with family, but as you'll see this was nothing compared to me exit at the other end. So staying in the present, we spent the week between Xmas and New Years in Venice Beach, where I found a funky hostel that took us back to our travelling days in SE Asia... talk about regaining your youth on the beaches of Southern California! But that is where we got the low-down on the fables sunshine, which is just that, fabled. As there's a cold ocean current offshore, there is constant evaporation and mist offshore that hugs the coastline. The same breezes that keep the coastline cool (and thus attracts everyone, pushes prices up and makes the mile band along the coast a millionaire's alley) also keep the mist swinging back and forth atop the beaches. So where is the sun? Nowhere to bee seen until it's burned off until about noon... We even had to buy Petra a jumpsuit to keep her warm in her pushchair, so much cooler it was than expected! Welcome to VVVVVenice BBBBBeach...

Life stories: 2001

 New home, for now [Previous ¦ Next]

My first year at "the Institute" or ESRI is a real rush. I find out why the speedy hiring, I had a petroleum show (the PUG or Petroleum User Group) to manage mid-February, with my boss' micro-management irking me as much as that in Dallas, the more things change... On the other hand that summer my first international show (the UC or User Conference) is also a real shock, as my boss cut me totally loose and I hosted almost a hundred petrol-heads among almost ten thousand geo enthusiasts - I knew that Esri co-founders Jack & Laura Dangermond had an almost cult following, but there I got it full on. I learned through our back neighbour - part of the terrible three with Jack and former petrol manager whose passing prompted my hiring - that Jack had a miserly youth (he shared ice cream cones wit hhis brother now running Dangermond Nurseries just up the road from Esri, next to Nader Auto Cars from yes, you guessed it, Ralph Nader's family) despite the fact they own a good part of the land, he was real trouble in school so much so that they sent him to Harvard just to get him out of town (that would put him @ Harvard Graphics Lab that lead to early computer mapping, and the rest as they say is history), and the he and Laura belonged to religious cult once (when asked a difficult question, Jack would bow his head and ruffle his hair, a latent reaction from days when he protected himself thusly when books were actually thrown at him). But that had a lasting effect on his company Esri - a tightly held private corporation with no shareholders, thus no-one knows its actual value, so don't believe any valuation - which they ran as their extensive family... at ~ 2,500 hirees then they considered to have that many children of sorts, and the 10,000 UC attendees their extended family. And Esri had truly a sound business model: software sales paid for R&D (meaning that as sales went up&down then software releases were simply brought up or delayed), maintenance revenue paid for salaries and infrastructure (this was rock solid after almost 40 yrs so that employment was super secure... so much so that sales people worked for salary sans commission), voila!

So come September we find ourselves a nice place 36 Hastings Street, as the house we kept five years in Calgary had appreciated enough, to give us a healthy down payment on a house here. I lay halfway up the north-facing hillside that was basically Redlands (the valley had the freeway from Palm Springs to LA), the mountains to the north were opposite straight up to Dripping Springs, Big Bear and Lake Arrowhead (a vertiginous drive straight up 9,000 feet to The Rim of the World, so called because when the valley was filled with smoke, mist of fog then standing along the ridge looked like you were at the rim of the world), and the next valley to the south had the railway and the remaining orange groves. The hillside itself used to be orange groves too, the odd garden showed remnant like our neighbours, and street ran along strike as their gutters were original irrigation ditches, and the streets straight uphill were original cart tracks to service the groves. You see families from Chicago and Montreal owned most of these, came down in the salubrious winter months and for the fall harvest, but left a skeleton staff of Chicanos to manage the orchards in the oppressive summer - oppressive that is before the days of air-conditioning. We learned that Orange county developed around two forms of a/c: cars in the fifties so that people didn't suffocate during traffic jams along the interstates to LA (yes even back then, that's why automatics were also introduced, so you could drive traffic jams without killing you clutch or developing varicose veins), and offices and homes so that that entire area could be opened up to offices that rapidly took over orchards - after the military industry left largely post-WWII (though bases still abound and it significant part of the economy, for ex. Iraqi invasion was staged from Camp Pendleton near San Diego, and troops were shipped via private charters from the airfield near Moreno Valley just south of Redlands) the entire area was taken over by secondary sector like insurance and finances, as the balmy climate attracted hordes from the cold & damp East Coast and blustery tornado-prone Mid West, and now a/c removed the last impediment of hottish summers.

We were however out-of-step with everyone it seemed: we went down to the beach in the winters that were both mild and clear skies while everyone went skiing in the mountains; and everyone went to the beach summers when the fog didn't lift till early afternoon and we went to the mountains where the air was cool & crisp. It was less than an hour down to Laguna Beach on a tollway, and the nearby Crystal Cove State Park (see 2015 update below) was our favourite hangout. In fact next to it was an old village of abandoned huts built during the Depression as people could live cheaply there of fishing, same as they did in Apple Valley above Yucaipa just next to Redlands: both uphill and along the coast the summers were bearable in the pre-a/c days. The California coast in fact has a 5 - 10 mile wide strip where the perennial coastal breezes (and fog) keep the temperature reasonable all year long, thus LA is very pleasant all year round but sais strip is called millionaires' alley as everyone want to live there and the pressure on real-estate makes that inside London look like nothing (and London is a small bubble w prices double the rest of the country, as everyone on earth wants to invest there, esp. new Chinese, Mid-eastern and Russian money). Out of step was also our desire to buy a car w manual gears, mostly because of the mountain roads (automatics didn't downshift at that time, to provide engine braking) and fuel consumption (even tho prices were half that in England), plus we didn't plan to live on freeways (see LA freeways below). That's a serious decision to only have one car, meaning that we didn't go to, say, 'the scene' in LA - neither did we in Texas or England it seems -and I walked to work until I bought a scooter to save myself time esp. in the summer heat. Sandra couldn't work again, so while we had Petra in Dallas, she went back to do an MA in Sociology at Cal State San Bernardino... Can you believe that the main street next to us extended down and across the valley to become the 30 turning parallel to the valley straight to San Bernardino? Now how handy is that! Little did we know, however, that it has good sides - I upgraded my ageing PC using CSUSB computer store and student discount - and bad ones - Sandra's distraction with studies while I was on the road had two effects: I reduced my overseas travel that proved to be the beginning of the end at ESRI for me, and Sandra didn't have attention - even tho she was studying mediation she excelled in - to, say, support me in my difficulties at ESRI that were all psych - perceptual but would lead to my ousting.

This was all well and good until a beautiful sunny & crisp morning in New York, yes, 9/11. While it didn't affect us then&then, except for the outpouring of jingoistic patriotism in a state where the military are still important, little did we know that was to be the beginning of the end, coincidentally and totally unrelated with similar if smaller 7/7 events in 2005 London.

LA freeways... : automatics and air-con(ditioning) were driven by So. Cal. freeway needs: stop&go traffic already in the 50s wore out clutches and joints; the intermittently largest parking lots in the world was subject to punishing heat summertimes! That is because it's at the seaward opening of a large E-W valley starting at  San Gorgonio (aka. Banning) Pass near Palm Springs: it constrains traffic to a handful of parallel freeways, which offer no respite of alternate routes in the case of a mishap or tie-up;  radial patterns in, say, Dallas or Houston allowed to move over to another branch in those cases. Also locals who spend time shuttling to work, shop or entertainment are called freeway flyers: we were privileged to have relatively stable jobs and local schools that avoided moving around for then driving to either as, say, Dallasites and Houstonians did.

2015 update: Crystal Cove village has indeed been restored in a private - government partnership program that turned half of the houses into swanky B&Bs crystalcovebeachcottages.com]

2016 Update: This site was retired in 2006 upon our return from California to England, as was now my next gen. website www.zolnai.ca.

Work stories: 1976

 Slumber-J [Previous ¦ Next]

 As a roughneck in my university summers on drilling rigs in Northern Alberta, Canada, I often saw blue trucks from Schlumberger then red trucks from Halliburton - the ones to lower logging tools into the borehole and measure underlying rock formations, the others to perform cementing or fracturing jobs and prepare a well for production. Roughnecks and tool-pushers on those rigs often came from nearby ranches to supplement their income, as farming was marginal even in those days and hourly pay on the rigs very good. Well folks, S-c-h-l-u-m-b-e-r-g-e-r was quite a handful to spell out when filling out work orders and contract sheets. Ranchers on the other hand were used, in branding cattle and for variety in symbols, to turn a letter on its side and call it “slumber-{letter}”. It’s not hard then to imagine that a phonetically correct Slumber-J (instead of Schlumberger) easily headed many a work order signed in Northern Alberta before the blue trucks rushed off to the next job... My bottom entry shows an updated scenario illustrating another transition from Rig to computeR.

Work stories: 1978

 "Little old Lady from Calgary-a" [Previous ¦ Next]

As a student I took a computer course, just to please my teaching supervisor! The University of Calgary Computer Science Department has a bank of mainframes, complete with deck readers, card punchers, shelves for computer printouts, and a scheduling board to book your time (only hockey rinks were booked later at 2AM) on a time share system using JCL (job control language). I believe it was an IBM mainframe, or perhaps a DEC VAX, but its claim to fame was this: Jim Gosling broke into the system just to prove to Comp. Sci. that he was worthy of empolyment there, and the rest as they say is history (hint: he started Java and went onto Sun Microsystems, like many a Canadian export).

So the final project on my Comp. Sci. 101 class was to simulate a skin disease by having noughts and ones eat each other according to certain rules across a virtual flatscape (think Flatland and the Game of Life, you can google it). But try as I may I couldn't get the @#$%^&* program to work! So I go see my TA the Friday it was due, and he said to stew over it over the weekend and come in on Monday to tell him the result. So on Sunday night I hoof it over to the lab, as that was the only free time slot to run jobs iteratively until they worked. So I stood beside this little old lady by the card punch, and guess what? She was cussing about these letter O's and number Zero's that are indistinguishable to her poor eyesight (don't ask me what a retiree was doing punching cards, it takes all sorts I guess). Bingo! I realised I was careless in my Os and 0s (see it you can tell which is which just there LOL), corrected my code and voila! the printouts were ready in a flash and my TA was happy Monday morning. To say the a little old lady saved my belief in computers is a understatement.

Work stories: 1981

Opportunities and Operating Systems [Previous ¦ Next]

August saw the launch of IBM’s PC, primitive as it was with 64 Kb RAM and no floppy disk! The operating system, PC-DOS that became MS-DOS outside IBM, was however on a roll (as was the IBM PC whose open specs fostered a hardware aftermarket that made all the difference with respect to Apple, that remained proprietary). How ironic then, that despite Apple and Unix launching the windowing desktop from Xerox, it was Microsoft Windows based on DOS that took over the desktop a decade later...

That summer I was in grad school, still boot-strapping a mainframe word processor with 8 in. diskettes; I remember learning to back up files early on, since an as-yet-unknown keystroke combination sorted my thesis alphabetically: and did it ever do it fast too… talk about “zero to dumb in under one second”!

Work stories: 1985

 Arctic Islands [Previous ¦ Next]

I spent a short summer in the High Arctic with the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC): do you know why the central airport in the Canadian high Arctic is at Resolute Bay on Cornwallis Island? Not only is it very near the magnetic pole (little one can do about that), but it's amidst a well-know perennial fog-bank in the summer (something could've been done about it, read on).

A coincidence in geology and geography made Siberia and northern Alberta very similar. Both had two petroleum provinces mid-continent in the foothills of orogenic belts, with shallow clastic and deep reef oil and gas deposits in significant amounts. And both were plains of rather higher elevation against mountain ranges with short summers and long days, and long dry winters. As Canada was not involved in the Cold War (indeed Kennedy suspected Trudeau sympathised with Krushtchev), there was a natural affinity and petroleum technology was freely exchanged across the N Pole. Then every two weeks a charter flights flew over the pole from Calgary to Novosibirsk. [For a weird twist of Cold War era geopolitics, see this here].

On the other side of the ideological divide, there used to be a friendly cat&mouse game going on between US and CDN [1], of lesser importance in the post-Cold War era [0] Canada claims sovereignty over the entire pie from the Yukon/Alaska border [2] up to the pole and down between Baffin Isl. and Greenland through Nares Straight. US claims the intervening international waters beyond the so-called 200 nautical mile Economic Exclusion Zone. To test that sovereignty, the US Navy used to ship a barge yearly through the Northwest Passage - from New York, south of Baffin Island, past Cornwallis Island and Mackenzie Delta, on to Prudhoe Bay. To further test this in the mid-fifties, the US decided to build an airbase to help with surveillance missions in the former Soviet Union. On the appointed summer, bureaucratic tie-ups and the extra organisation to ship an airport in spare parts delayed the departure of the convoy until September. Wouldn't you know that by end of month when they reached Cornwallis Island, the ice-bank had already closed across the straight as it does every year by October [3]. So the convoy turned around, but only after off-loading said airport materials to pick up next year, and make the round-trip faster and cheaper - the Arctic is very dry and sparsely inhabited, so leaving gear up there is no big deal (I found many caches from forty years ago, with pristine cans of peanut butter, dried bananas... and spam).

So the US Navy went back next year and earlier in August, but that one was one cold summer where the ice never left the ground (same as ‘85 when I went up, which is why I was told this story). Having gone all that way and looking for something to show for their travails, they decided then&there to build the airport right where the gear was dumped on Cornwallis Island. Voilà! Instant airport with no rationale as to its location, other than traveling mishaps and ice - which, in their defence, is the rule in the Arctic anyway... It has been used ever since. Resolute Bay is a thriving community, used by CDN government field-parties that spend summers there as part of the claim to sovereignty (a whole program called Polar Continental Shelf Project went for almost 50 years though it's staggering nowadays amidst government cutbacks and new Arctic geopolitics). The only problem however is that Resolute Bay sits right in the middle of a perennial fog-bank, which any Inuit (Eskimo) could have informed anyone who cared to ask! So it's a ritual up there to build in ten days slack on each end of a short summer field season, just in case fog fails to lift at appointed flight times (and Murphy has a field-day on that one).

0: 2009 update: but of renewed importance in the 1985 Arctic geopolitics

1: Q - do you know what the acronym C-D-N for Canada stands for?
A - Commonwealth Dominion of North-america back

2: itself under dispute with pending ANWR drilling, does it go perpendicular to shoreline (US claim as it give it more of Mackenzie delta) or straight up to the pole (CDN claim)? This happens on every shore, and is a classic GIS problem. back

3: in the field can be found nests made of stone, which were set up by Vikings to encourage eider geese to nest in - Vikings used to make October runs from Greenland to mid-Arctic and back on their sleek vessels to collect the eider down, after the geese had flown south and before the snow set in. Legend has it that they were once blown/forced off course and ended up over-wintering in Newfoundland 500 or so years before Christopher Columbus landed on Caribbean beaches (he had the better deal both in terms of climatic conditions and of what history recorded). 

Work stories: 1986

 Geo/SQL [Previous ¦ Next]

My start in geographic info systems (GIS) was at the Geological Survey of Canada: I compiled Arctic Islands geology in a database management system, and sent files to Ottawa headquarters for referencing against ESRI coverages (electronic map sheets) prepared at the federal mapping agency in Canada's capital. I went on to joint-venture with a geophysical company, who also needed such digital data capture services. I ended up working with Bill who later founded Geo/SQL, because we had both devised an AutoCAD front-end to Oracle and DB2, which was in high demand in the oil industry. I initially met people at Chevron, Gulf and Texaco in Calgary who saw an immediate need in posting wells and plotting pipeline routes (seismic was deemed to be a more difficult and later task). Bill was a surveyor who programmed a 10Kb geospatial kernel that handled re-projections of data in the AutoCAD window, and fetched data from Oracle or DB2 via structured query language (SQL).

Side story: So near yet so far: this a a pretty small world at the time in geo-computing. Bill and I took this idea of a geo kernel to spatialize Autodesk's AutoCAD by calling up then head John Walker. We got his PA at the time Carol Bartz - later to lead Autodesk and become famous at Yahoo! (exclamation mark part of the name brand) -   and various conversations lead Bill to travel to Sausalito CA then Autodesk HQ, but nothing came of it. Imagine our brush with fame, had AutoCAD been spatialized... not only would this web page look very different, but Autodesk might've given Intergraph and Esri a run for their money at the time! Enigma and  Munro give follow-ons to this story.

Neither SQL nor GIS meant much to anybody as this was still pretty innovative. Open was not yet a buzzword and Unix was actually platform-dependant, so we decided to work on PCs running DOS: it came without graphics however (Windows was yet to become the standard it is today), so AutoCAD was chosen for its rich graphical interface; its scripting language AutoLisp was also open unlike, say, Intergraph on workstations that remained proprietary . [1]My efforts faltered in both petroleum and mining, where the need for GIS wasn’t yet perceived in Western Canada (see Enigma above). Geo/SQL went on to a turbulent history, change of hands in Colorado then Japan, and finally back to Bill who contracts to this day in Texas.

1: Bentley eventually broke the binary code and started MicroStation on PCs. Binary formats were common then (s.a. ESRI coverages as well as Autodesk and Intergraph CAD files) because of hardware restrictions that demanded files be small, and large datasets broken into tiles for adequate processing. Being binary also helped maintain proprietary formats, in days when files were deemed to hold competitive advantages - open standards and file exchange had to wait a while (see Prizm). 

Work stories: 1987

 Windows [Previous ¦ Next]

Landmark Graphics said it sold to Microsoft the brand name Windows, from its early graphical front-end to applications and databases called OpenWindows (note that Sun Microsystems has a documentation interface by the same name). The prefix "Open" survived as a brand name in Landmark's flagship petroleum database OpenWorks and OpenExplorer (see Enigma), until the advent of a company called OpenSpirit and a show called Oracle OpenWorld.

Work stories: 1988

 Enigma Software [Previous ¦ Next]

I joined a small startup company who took a hashing algorithm, originally written for the Texas School Board library program to catalogue books in that very large state. We stored on CD-ROMs and indexed for ultra-fast retrieval the entire well data set for the province of Alberta, Canada. It then added production and the same for the rest of western Canada on two more CDs, which were updated monthly and sold to oil companies by subscription - CDs were so uncommon then, that CD readers had to be leased to subscribers!

The data came from a local regulatory quirk: after two years operators had to make public all well and production data, which the Provincial government became maintained but did not distribute; a cottage industry developed in Calgary around that, and resulted in a comprehensive data set in the third largest petroleum province in the world. 150,000 wells were however not easy to store and retrieve, except by major oil companies with significant databasing facilities.

The CD-ROMs were a hit for small-to-medium companies, and they rapidly demanded a graphical user interface to the text searching front-end. I found a group of consultants called Enigma (some of whom were from Texaco and Chevron - see Geo/SQL), would have gladly added a GUI had the owner agreed to it - again, mapping and GIS were not yet in vogue! I went on to another data vendor, who also created later a mapping front-end to its data-delivery system (see Munro).

Work stories: 1989

 Prizm Consortium [Previous ¦ Next]

Proprietary data formats were causing oil companies and vendors to constantly read-write and re-write data from one format to another. One operator in Calgary, Canada got a data vendor and a software company to agree to a set of standards - respectively Gulf Canada, Digitech and Finder (now ChevronTexaco, IHS Energy and Schlumberger Info Services by way of Chevron, QC Data and GeoQuest respectively...). Data standards had been tried before, but they tended to reflect the old IT school - monolithic data models by programmers, for programmers that took significant efforts to maintain and update. The Prizm Consortium as it was called became the Public Petroleum Data Model Association, with a business-driven set of standards written as Oracle scripts to reflect both client and vendor needs. It exists to this day, unlike others gone with the vagaries of their respective sponsors.

Work stories: 1992

 Metronet, DiscoveryPlace.com, etc. [Previous ¦ Next]

Calgary was decidedly a hotbed of petroleum computing: over 500 energy companies crammed into a 10 square block of downtown with an comprehensive set of local data available from one government agency. That did not escape the attention of another agency, the then Alberta Government Telephone: they laid down optical fiber in most buildings for free, as a loss-leader to collect transaction fees among linked energy companies and data and software vendors. The bargain paid off as there rapidly emerged the largest WAN (wide-area network), coinciding with the advent of client-server hardware environment and open standard databases like Oracle.

The Metronet as that WAN was called, fostered other ventures but luck was running out. Fujitsu installed a large parallel supercomputer to help energy companies outsource very large data transaction processes, but that never flew. A precursor to portals was Discovery Place launched by another agency, the Alberta Research Council. It failed ironically because the optically wired city was actually slower in espousing the internet and its portals - what compelling reason had anyone to access abroad what already existed at home?

Work stories: 1994

 Munro Engineering [Previous ¦ Next]

I went on to do various projects in GIS and data management in petroleum and also utilities and defense (real-time tracking along trunk lines and shipping lanes, published in GISworld) before returning to my alma mater. Munro Engg. had a GIS front-end to data warehouses finally hired me - imagine my excitement in not only finding a like-minded company, but also meeting again the old Enigma crew! That company went on to be bought by Landmark, except for the non-petroleum part who tackled the US market – having been eaten alive by the likes of ArcView and MapInfo, the entire team ended up at AutoDesk. As Munro had http hooks well before anyone knew or cared what the internet was, thus was born AutoDesk’s internet application MapGuide (AutoDesk went on to purchase another Canadian liquidation, Vision which became Design for data management).

Meanwhile back at the ranch 'n "gooddol' Tey-xas", petroleum Argus was killed by Landmark, who was commissioned by a British firm to create an Geographic Info System (GIS) front-end to their petroleum Oracle database - OpenExplorer is the product I supported until joining ESRI, creators of ArcView GIS used here. That product sells the most runtime ArcView for ESRI, and inspired most competitors in that space to adopt a similar front-end – most companies also demand ArcView for the ease of use in Unix and NT, and data interoperability through shape files, which became the format standard for GIS data through its open data specification.

Work stories: 1998

 In the trenches [Previous ¦ Next]

Implementing OpenExplorer at Landmark client sites around the world, I most often ended up working side-by-side with GeoQuest teams (see Y2K). I also started to work on software by ESRI, for whose product ArcView we would sell the most runtime licenses - little did I know where that would lead me eventually! In the meantime,  major accounts often split Landmark applications and GeoQuest data management, so project teams always worked together with clients, while marketing pitched the two companies against each other; this wasn’t always a smooth process, and it reminded of a purported event in 1914: at the beginning if World War I [1], Canadian and German soldiers apparently celebrated Christmas together above the trenches... and the next day resumed shooting each other! Metaphors aside, clients quickly saw the benefits of GIS front-ends to data warehouses, and demand for similar functionality increased radically after a slow start – the benefit of GIS in data management was taking hold of the petroleum industry’s imagination.

1: in the euphoria at the beginning, what was briefly called the gallant war was thought to be over next spring; the war to end all wars as it was later called, marked the transition from chivalresque charges of the light brigade (as in the Crimean War over 50 years earlier), to grinding trench and tank warfare: the horrendous human sacrifice, barely abated by large-scale deployment of the Red Cross (also started in Crimea), was also a dim glimmer of what would follow a mere 25 years later during World War II... 

Work stories: 1999

 Diatomite [Previous ¦ Next]

One of my more successful data management projects was at Aera Energy in Bakersfield CA. Just north of LA across the Grapevine (a cross range caused by a seaward bend of the San Andreas Fault), lie a forest of oil wells on sub-acre spacing, almost a hundred years in age. Oil seeps belie a field so rich, that one simply drills and finds heavy crude just light enough to produce by steam-flooding (the project consisted of improving data management processes with the intent of reducing steam injection costs, and we'd get a cut of the savings... one way to leap into the big league!).

Geologically this was a strange province, because the producing formation is diatomite, tightly packed and very prolific skeletons of microscopic size inside which living organisms decayed into petroleum, in an area of high heat heat flow (high temperatures on the rim of the Pacific ocean with active plates and volcanoes). The organic content and temperatures were so high, that petroleum was produced literally in-place, without rocks being buried very deeply (the only analogue is in Indonesia with similar heat and burial regime, and very rich jungle vegetations being cooked into oil). Such formations had high porosity (lots of space inside and in between the skeletons) but low permeability (little if any connection between the pores in the skeletons, tightly packed as they turned into rock). There was also no deep burial of the oil-producing formations, and there is no pressure of hydrostatic recharge (pressure of water trying to reach the surface, like in hot springs along the San Andreas Fault) - the classical configuration of oilfields saw gas pushed on top of oil, itself on top of water. Here gas if there was any simply evaporated through surface cracks, water if there was any escaped through the deep faults, and oil simply sat in the tight formations from which it could not easily escape (low permeability).

Oil was also so prolific, that there was no real need for any geology or geophysics to place producing wells. One simply drilled, completed, pumped and logged often enough to track oil production. Logging here consisted however of lowering electric tools to follow the drop of the top of the oil, not the rise of the gas/oil of oil/water contact as customary. This is because there was no formation pressure pushing the oil up (no hydrostatic recharge) - oil simply drained out of the formation, like water out of a bathtub (oil and gas more commonly come out the top like froth out of a champagne bottle). In fact no-one actually really knew what happened in the rock formation above the oil as it drained! The emptied top of the formation was called air-sand, a term found nowhere else in the annals of oil production. It was real enough though: if one pumped oil out too quickly, the formation near the surface collapsed very slightly as oil no longer propped up the rock formation, and the pump jacks got jammed in very slight depressions (in fact so shallow that they're measured with laser-ranging devices used nearby to track earth movements along the San Andreas Fault). So little was needed to be known of the subsurface to produce oil over the first 75 years, that when steam was injected in a second phase of enhanced recovery (common in oilfields exceeding 50 years of age), steam did not go where it was supposed to go... and oil recovery was only marginally improved (hence my project to improve production through better data, in exchange for a cut in the savings on steam injection).

Work stories: 2000

 Y2K (Year 2000) [Previous ¦ Intro]

Few periods in computing history saw so much effort put into and so little learned from, than the months running up to the year 2000. It started as a fair enough concern that old computer code, written decades ago to save space and thus entering dates as two (98) rather than four digits (1998), would not know how to interpret the year when it turned to 00, as 2000 or 1900? Snake-oil peddlers and honest managers alike got caught up in a maelstrom that went over the new millennium without even a pop, except for the noise created by the self-styled fear of Y2K.

Needless to say my employer got caught up in the act, as I was involved in data management projects where dates were not insignificant. That gave me an opportunity to move from Houston to London, and have our baby daughter get closer to grandparents in England and France! So I end up at BP in Sunbury, its old research center dating back to World War I, and now a hub of global data management from Azerbaijan through Brazil and Vietnam to Sakhalin. We had three months to rationalise their software, reduce its numbers to manageable levels as management changed its tune: it turned silos of exploration, production, finance and research (each with their jealously-guarded turf), into asset teams responsible for oil provinces from cradle to grave (which meant integrating all business processes); this is not unlike switching car production from assembly-lines at Ford for Model Ts, to teams responsible for each individual car at Volvo over half a century later.

On the shop floor where data is acquired, managed and handed to the geologists, engineers and accountants, Landmark and GeoQuest shared the turf - one managed data and the other the applications that turned data into information. Lots of toing-and-froing ensued with a year-end deadline looming, because one could never tell what might happen with those chopped-off dates! Both companies were pitched against each other in sales and marketing, as part of the two largest oilfield service firms, Halliburton born in Oklahoma and Schlumberger near Paris at about the time Model T Fords were built (my top entry illustrates an oilfield scenario repeated ever since)... Meanwhile back at the ranch (or the cottage) we simply had a job to get done in less than three months... So I helped forge a love-hate relationship with my 'competitors', who in time turned into camaraderie and cooperation for the common good of they who paid our bills (I had cut my teeth at Mobil in Dallas on a similar project almost five years earlier, with the deadline looming... that of the future ExxonMobil merger!). That effort bore fruit in my latest job, when both companies called on me to help them build GIS front-ends for their enterprise database offerings (rumor had it in fact that I joined ESRI, just so I could work above-board with both!).

Indicative of the fallacy of Y2K is that while the project came in on time and budget, a few items impossible to finish by year-end (as agreed to by all) quietly trickled on past the new millennium with neither (wo)man nor machine missing a beat...

2016 Update: This site was retired in 2006 upon our return from California to England, as was now my next gen. website www.zolnai.ca.